I have built a cage in myself that stifles my passion for you. Surely, I was not alone in the criminal act, but just as surely I must have laid the foundation for it myself or it could not have been built at all. Why is it so easy for you to add to the walls instead of helping me avoid working from these tired old blueprints?

This cage seems innocuous enough - it is even worse than that, it is a cage sought and desired by many! It slips by the awareness as wonderful little fantasies about the future, and by the time it is formed has prevented the future from being what it always is and must be - unknown. It kills spontenaiety, and with it stymies desire. It walks onstage, welcomed, as a cure for the insecurity of not knowing, and then refuses to leave when not knowing becomes so necessary to romance and passion.

Why do I allow myself to lay this foundation? Why do I welcome its presence at all? Is it a response to your tentativity, to your periods of indecision, to allay your fears and allow you some conventional ideas to calm your fears? Why must you walk away so early instead of foolishly rushing headlong into the unknown insanity (which is where passion lives)? Why must you exhaust my vulnerability before you can enjoy it, before it can even serve a useful purpose in our lives? You bring it on so fast, and then I learn to heal it, to cover it, to save it from the torment of the unknown.

Those very same torments are the tensions of passion, a very different foundation, which provides the power and energies that are necessary for passion to be enduring. But this foundation is a delicate one, not poured in concrete but balanced tantalizingly in midair and so easily fossilized in the laying out of the foundations of security. Why couldn't we simply live in the castle in the sky, even though building it requires such an act of faith, such a constant vigilance to keep it unrooted, vulnerable, unknown in its future dimensions?

This airy, open, skyward castle from its foundation to every soaring unimaginable tower does not have a blueprint, it is built out the very unknowns that are so terrifying - it will always have doors and hallways that lead directly to the abyss, it will have rooms with no roofs, windows with no view, and sometimes it will seem to be unreachable due to its lack of anchor in the world around it. The only entrance to its splendor is through our steadfastly open selves.

I know you cannot know this about me in advance, so I cannot lay the blame for your abettance in the building of the mundane shack in which we now live directly at your feet, the blame lies in my invitation to build it, my lack of a way to get to the castle I need to live in in the face of your retreats and confusions.

How can I cast away forever these foolish blueprints for the cage so many seek to build and yet so few could be happy living within?

5/14/01

© Huw Powell
printed 29 March 2024

return to love12

file location: www.humanthoughts.org/love12.htm